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Honest Tea celebrates National Compliment Day on Twitter

With so much negativity in social media platforms, the simple compliment seems like a rarity. Honest Tea is looking to change that.

It’ll be using the hashtag #honestcompliment all day Friday (which you may not know is National Compliment Day) to dole out—you guessed it—honest, personalized compliments. It’s not a sweepstakes and there’s no giveaway involved (though it did offer some small prizes to people who answered a few questions Thursday). It’s just a brand complimenting some strangers for real things.

The idea evolved from the brand’s event marketing efforts, where teams hand out compliments with a sample. “[It’s] a fun way we’ve found to engage with consumers on a genuine and real one-on-one basis and make a lasting impact,” Honest Tea public relations manager Joanna Seiden told PR Daily. “This is our first real attempt at translating that experience onto Twitter and we’re excited to see how it turns out.”

The campaign may be coming at the perfect time. Honest Tea recently surveyed 2,400 people to learn more about how people offer compliments. The full results can be seen in the infographic below, but perhaps the biggest takeaway is that while the most people (44 percent) would prefer to receive a compliment from a family member, 30 percent say they’d prefer to receive a compliment from a random stranger.

It’s also good to see a brand making it a point to engage on an individual level. This is certainly one way to buck the trend of brands simply not replying on Twitter. Here’s an example of Honest Tea’s efforts:

This is another in a line of bold marketing efforts for the brand. This past summer, Honest Tea set up unmanned vending stands asking people to pay a dollar per bottle. The results—found in the National Honesty Index—are fascinating. Blondes and people wearing eye glasses were the most honest, while only 90 percent of my bald brethren paid the dollar.

Seiden describes both campaigns as “fun, genuine social experiment(s).”